Whimsy: April 2005 Archives
The food pyramid is going away, and Sean Gleeson has uncovered the U. S. Department of Agriculture's new visual guide to what's good for us: "USDA to unveil Nutrition Frowny Face." Visit the Gleeson Bloglomerate to see the poster for the selected concept, as well as posters for a couple of the rejected prototypes -- the "Nutrition Ceiling Fan" and the "Nutrition Martini."
(Hat tip: Dan and Angi.)
Joe Carter of the Evangelical Outpost has been recycling bits from a newspaper humor/advice column he used to write, and today he's got some choice excerpts with links to the full column.
For example:
On napping -- For a woman, catching her husband napping is the second worst thing she can catch her man doing in their bed. (The first, of course, is discovering him drinking grape Kool-Aid on the 300 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets. Finding him with another woman, however, runs a close third.) Women believe that the only reason a man would want to take a nap is because he is either trying to ignore her or is avoiding spending time with her. The truth is that men take naps because we are tired. Too tired, in fact, to think of more creative ways to ignore our wives and avoid spending time with them.
Here's the last strip in the series. Albert's done with his taxes. Hope you are too.
Pogo by Walt Kelly, April 14, 1956. Last in a series of 5. Click here for previous comic, click here to go back to the beginning.
The IRS never makes it easy....
Pogo by Walt Kelly, April 13, 1956. Y'all enjoying these? Let me hear from you. By the way, the distortion and greyness in the last frame is the result of scanning out of a book. I'm learning how to use the GIMP, and I suspect there's a way to correct for that, but I haven't figured it out yet. This is 4 in a series of 5. Click for previous, next comic.
Another Pogo strip to help ease your tax preparation woes. I'm done, but Albert is still figgerin'. I needed tax advice this good.
Pogo by Walt Kelly, April 12, 1956. Alas, most Pogo books are out of print, but you can find some new and used by searching for "Walt Kelly" at Amazon. This is 3 in a series of 5. Click for previous, next comic.
A tip of the hat to Mee Citee Wurkor for calling attention to Gizoogle, which translates any web page into gangsta-ese.
I wonder, I thought, whether the drollery of Dustbury would survive such a transformation. I was not disappointed. (Warning: The translator generates some foul language.)
(The anti-framing technology of the site means you can't use Gizoogle to translate B-to-tha-izzatesLine. Sorry.)
In the spirit of the season, Bobby of Tulsa Topics has posted a Western Swing tune called "Taxes, Taxes," performed by Hank Penny.
I'm going to be a little busy for the next day or two...
Pogo, by Walt Kelly, April 10, 1956. First of five. Click for next comic.
If you learned Latin, you probably learned about Horatio (Horatius Cocles), the brave Roman soldier who single-handedly fended off the Etruscan army as the Romans destroyed the bridge across the Tiber behind him. As a reward for his bravery, Horatio received as much land as he could plow around in a day.
... or so Livy wrote. But ancient Roman Army memoranda, published in the January 1953 issue of the British Army Journal, reveal what happened after Horatio's reward went through proper channels.
(You'll find the title in its original bureaucratese here, and its author here.)
I just came across a terrific tribute to Pogo, Walt Kelly's classic comic strip. The author, one Neddie Jingo, says that it's a shame if the only thing you know about Pogo is, "We have met the enemy and he is us":
As a technician, Kelly's contribution to the cartoonist's craft is probably even greater than George Herriman's; Kelly's influence is just howlingly obvious in the way Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes characters moved, and how his strips were laid out -- hell, even in his use of vegetation as a framing device. Pioneering, too, was his characters' proscenium-breaking; when Albert Alligator, lighting his see-gar, reaches out and strikes his match on the panel border, you're seeing a form so confident in its maturity that it can afford to be playful. ...It's in the realm of language that Kelly truly shone. His daily strip was a wonderful mangrove of puns and portmanteaux, all delivered in a disarming parody of Southern speech (Kelly was himself from Bridgeport, Connecticut -- not exactly a hotbed of Southern literary tradition), and his poetry and song lyrics were so rich with utterly effortless linguistic play that it's impossible not to nominate him as America's answer to Lewis Carroll.
The tribute features several Pogo strips and other artwork. You'll find the place-name-heavy lyrics to the song "Go, Go, Pogo" -- along with a link to an MP3 of the song, sung by Walt Kelly hisself.
Hat tip to whomever reached this site with a search for this bit of Pogo poetry:
How pierceful grows the hazy yon! How myrtle petaled thou! For spring hath sprung the cyclotron, How high browse thou, brown cow?
You'll find more Pogo poetry at languagehat.com. And if you're looking for the jingle for Wummies ("They're gristle to your mill!"), look no further.
You'll find my own tribute to the Possum here.
In other whimsical news, I am pleased to announce that BatesLine is the number one Google result for "Gruntfuttock."
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